Just as curiosity, have you changed feed or vitimins, feeding regimines? It can be amazing what having a little too much or not enough, minerals or vitimins can do to animals. We see problems with certain hay, grain, vitimin feeding programs in young horses. Calcium-Phosphorus balance is the most common. Alfalfa hay skews the Calcium way over, leading to tight tendons, other problems. Many people feed Alfalfa hay, lots of grain, makes for heavy weight on young bones that need different minerals. See a lot of lame young horses from poor feed choices. With the different pig breeds named, I can't point at breeding being the factor. Sometimes you get a line of related animals who have the same problems, so you point at breeding. Don't use that stallion or his relatives again. The other person mentioned a disease. Something that would be passed between pigs or a germ living in the barn, farrowing areas. Sounds like a reasonable idea to me. I am most familiar with horse problems and a couple things happen to bred mares. Rhino that causes abortions coming to mind first. All horses can carry the Rhino bugs, might give them a cold type infection, no big deal to healthy horse. Rhino causes the bred mare to often slip her foal. There is a Rhino vaccination, given at 5-7-9 months. Problem comes when giving the vaccine, because the mare can ALSO abort from the shots! Abortions from shots happen often, not always on the first or second shot either. Just really a heartbreaker to lose a foal that far along. However for the big breeder, multiple mares, they save most of the crop. They also preg check mares, palpate a couple days after shots, to ID any mare who lost a foal. Get her bred back immedialtly. Nobody TELLS the single mare breeder about problems with shot until AFTER foal is lost, "Oh yeah, abortions can happen when you do those shots". Keeping track with acquaintences, they lose more than 50% of foals when giving shots. Pretty high losses. I advise single mare owners to avoid the shots. Few of those mares are exposed to Rhino anyway, not much new horse traffic thru their barn. The other horse thing was feeding fescue grass. With the infected fescue, mare develops a very tough bag tissue holding the foal. Bag also turns red, hence the name Red-Bag Delivery. I think the foals can't get out of the bag quick enough to breath, and those who are helped, still have problems, die. One of the big warnings for bred mare owners, don't feed fescue grass/hay in the last couple months of pregnancy. Those with fescue grass, dry lot the mares in paddocks, feed hay to avoid problems. With the terribly high numbers you are having, perhaps some help is called for. Your vet should be asking questions, call the local State College, get some information coming. It may be your local problem, could be wider spread. Pig problems affect a lot of people, big money loss. When we had swine Cholera locally some years back, the State had teams of people all over the place, IMMEDIATLY. Slapped a bunch of rules into effect, regarding shipping, hygiene, selling, checking before unloading. Our local area had thousands of pigs being raised, was a major feeder pig source. The rules did prevent the spread of the disease, helped restrict the problem and loss of more pigs. You need to make some noise, get some big time help with such a serious problem. The money loss is pretty bad for you right now. Allowing a problem to spread could wipe folks right out of business. Get the vet and some of those experts we all pay for down from the College to help find the root problem, come up with the solution so the pigs are back to normal. My best wishes to you, sure hope the answers come soon.

Well I feel the grass is too young for most herbicides, even Tenacity (check the label again I believe they recommend after two mowings or four weeks after seeding, whichever is longer). Chickweed is a winter annual, so it's not going to lay down any seed this fall. I would just let it do whatever it's doing for now, the first mowing will probably take a good amount of it off. After you mow a few times, I would give it a hit of CCO or Tenacity, although it might not be that effective if temps are too low. Next spring you will be able to get rid of it for good.

Boy am I jealous bruz! It's cold here too and rainy and so not good gardening weather. All those blooms too. I can relate to the shovel and wheelbarrow scene.....I have dug up so much sod in my yard to make new gardens all over...back breaking but I love the results. You should be proud of your work!

Plant all sh2 varieties close together, they are correct that sh2's can grow side by side with little variation in flavor. Do not plant any other corn type that can pollinate with sh2. When sh2 crosses with su or se+, the result is very starchy poorly flavored corn. Planting sh2 with synergistic is the opposite problem, the sweetness and flavor of the synergistic variety will be reduced. Cold tolerance tends to be pretty weak in sh2 varieties so I highly recommend planting into thoroughly warm soil. IMO, su varieties should be limited in your garden because they are less useful in terms of ways to be prepared. There are very few corn varieties that can be compared to Country Gentleman for making creamed corn so please consider growing this variety. Silver Queen is the standard of comparison for a su variety. It makes a decent flavored corn on the cob variety, but I personally do not like the thick pericarp. Cold tolerance in su varieties is the best of the sweet corns. The se+ varieties are less viable in cold soil so I advise planting them a bit later than su varieties. I advise finding a few different se+ varieties than you currently have on the list. Silver King is a commonly available standard se+ variety that can be found in most seed stores. I usually don't recommend a vendor specific variety, but Burpee's Breeders Choice corn is much better than most other mid-early yellows. Do not plant se+ varieties with su types. The result is that the se+ corn is significantly less sweet. I have less experience with synergistics than with the other types so do a little more verifying on this info. Synergistics are intended to combine several different genes into a single package which means you don't have to worry about planting them near just about any other type of sweet corn. However, most of the synergistics are less sweet if pollinated by other varieties. The only synergistic I have grown suffered from the same issues as sh2's. They are very sweet, somewhat watery, and imo, have poor flavor. Corn endosperm is triploid. When the pollen grain grows down through the silk, it splits into two nuclei, one of them combines with a specialized cell to become the germ. The other combines with a diploid cell to become the endosperm which is what we can taste. This means that corn is one of the very few foods that tastes different depending on which direction a cross is made and depending on the dosage effect of the pollen that fertilizes the kernel. If you plant an se+ variety and cross it with sh2 pollen, the result is two sets of genes for se+ and one set of genes for sh2. The dosage effect means the se+ corn will taste like a standard sugary corn but with a slight starchy flavor. In the other direction, an sh2 corn pollinated by an se+ will get two sets of genes for sh2 and one set of se+. But the se+ variety has a gene that patches the defect which causes the sh2 corn to be sweet. The result is corn that tastes like very starchy field corn. My preference is for se+ corn. I am in the process of stabilizing a cross of Country Gentleman X Silver King in an attempt to combine the shoepeg trait (pi2 gene) with sugary (su gene) and sugar enhanced (se gene). I am at the F2 stage which means this year I have seed that will segregate for the desired traits. The tough part is that only one plant in 16 will have the desired combination so I have some work to do to pick out just a few plants with the desired combination. Anyone want to help me taste 100 ears of corn to find 7 that taste really sweet and have the shoepeg trait?